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When Kendrick Lamar and SZA took the stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on the latest stop on their Grand National Tour, the duo’s combined star power was a thing to behold (not to mention a major selling point for the ever-swelling cost of a concert ticket).
But there’s another superstar whose name doesn’t appear on the poster whose presence is felt throughout the show. And if you’ve been paying any attention to pop culture over the past year, you already know who I’m referring to.
Drake hangs like a wraith over the Grand National Tour, his business on Earth very much unfinished. Lamar makes sure of that: Instead of letting their rap beef grow stale, he performs two of his explosive Drake diss tracks in full (“Euphoria” and “Not Like Us”) in addition to his hit collaboration with Future and Metro Boomin, “Like That,” which was responsible for reigniting the feud in the first place. (For her part, SZA sings “Rich Baby Daddy,” a collab with Drake from 2023, but erases Drake’s contributions from her performance. The shade!)
These musical war cries are punctuated by fireworks, showers of sparks, and plumes of fire that burst from the stage with a vengeance. Lamar’s production choices assume that his audience will rally behind him as the music industry’s self-described “biggest hater,” and on Thursday, that assumption paid off generously: The crowd of over 50,000 people was all too eager to sing along and revel in the bloodshed.
Some of the evening’s loudest lines in the crowd were Drake-specific insults, including Lamar’s incredulous, “What is it, the braids?” from “Euphoria” and, of course, the notorious “Not Like Us” rallying cry: “Tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A-minor.”
The latter was the final solo track that Lamar performed — an emphatic, hard-earned finale. During Lamar’s third verse, a mini history lesson that dubs Drake a “colonizer,” my friend turned to me and deadpanned, “That man is so done.”
While “Not Like Us” can still be enjoyed as a banger in its own right (shoutout to Lamar’s producer, Mustard, for that indelible instrumental), by making his diss tracks a cornerstone of his set list, Lamar ensures that his triumph over Drake stays top of mind.
A full year after Drake’s final diss track was released and Lamar was crowned victor by fans and critics, Lamar has baked this beef into his mythology as an artist. It wasn’t enough just to win — he wants to be known forever as the winner.
Even in the face of legal threats, Lamar hasn’t backed down. In fact, the lawsuit Drake filed against their shared record label, which Universal Music Group recently moved to dismiss, has arguably only emboldened Lamar’s taunts.
The Grand National Tour is threaded with video interludes, many of which depict Lamar in a mock deposition. He chuckles when the off-camera interviewer accuses him of being “addicted to attention” and asks if his harshest lyrics should be taken as threats. “Whatever you wanna take it,” Lamar replies.
In another clip, Lamar is asked to account for where he was on May 4, 2024, the day he unleashed “Not Like Us.” Lamar shakes his head, protesting that he has too much going on to remember specific dates, driving his point home even further — that his dominance has no plottable beginning or foreseeable end.
“Not Like Us” was celebrated by fans as a musical kill shot, but even if Lamar’s enemies are metaphorically dead, he’ll labor to keep their memory alive. There’s no rest for the wicked.
